A Turgid WWI Medical Drama

1918 in Italy was, a title reminds us, “the year of victory.” Yet the first images in Gianni Amelio‘s WWI-set “Battleground” are anything but triumphal: a pile of bloodied soldiers’ bodies glinting wetly in the moonlight; a scavenger pilfering the wallets of the dead; a blanket thrown over a survivor whose gibbering shellshock makes him too abject to look at. The irony is heavy, the way everything in this stultifyingly serious drama is heavy: the skies, the mood, the movements of Luan Amelio Ujkaj’s stately-to-the-point-of-staid camera. The year may have ended in victory but for the Italian soldiers fighting on the frontlines, and for a civilian population numbed by loss and wartime poverty, most of 1918 was spent somewhere closer to despair. 

This national demoralization — a feeling rather too well evoked by “Battleground”‘s sluggish pacing and disjointed storytelling — is palpable to Stefano (Gabriele Montesi) and his old friend and fellow doctor Giulio (Alessandro Borghi), who jointly patrol the scrubbed wards of a crowded military clinic in Northern Italy. The pair share an unexplained but apparently deep bond, despite harboring very different outlooks on the correct interpretation of their Hippocratic oaths in times of war. Stefano, stiff, repressed but fiercely aware of patriotic duty and deeply scornful of “traitors” who would use their injuries as an excuse to get out of further fighting, is all too willing to hurry along a convalescence or to declare an obviously unwell patient fit, if it means he can send them back to the front. Giulio, stiff, repressed but fiercely aware of the hypocrisy of sending young men to their highly probable deaths when he himself has evaded such a fate, is increasingly moved to help his patients get sent home instead. Even if, in many cases, that means deliberately maiming them or otherwise making them, with their consent, more unwell than they were before. 

Unbeknownst to Stefano, Giulio has set up a surgery in the little attic lab ostensibly used for his ongoing experiments with bacteria. After hours, and in between tinkering with petri dishes and microscopes, he “treats” a steady trickle of fervently grateful war-weary patients by giving them venereal diseases that make them go deaf or conducting only marginally necessary amputations. The sheer variety of ailments on display does give rise to some impressive prosthetics: the most valuable technical contribution may just come from the make-up department who do a neat, gross line in suppurating lesions, crusting eye infections and gangrenous wounds wrapped in clotting, ragged bandages. 

Sometimes, as Giulio tends to his dubious calling with an almost sociopathic stoicism, there’s a semi-fanatical gleam in his eye that hints at the much more interesting film — and character — this could have been. But instead of pursuing the fraught dramatics of a doctor who feels ethically bound to make his patients sicker — and is perhaps on some level professionally intrigued by the prospect — Amelio’s film, co-written by the director and Alberto Taraglio and loosely inspired by a popular recent Italian novel, opts for an almost comically undercooked romantic angle. 

Anna (Federica Rosellini) a nurse who attended the same university as Giulio and Stefano but whose brilliant medical career was stymied by institutional sexism, arrives at the clinic. Though Anna is every bit as stiff and repressed as her beaux — her expressions range from prim disapproval to prim dismay — and though there’s so little chemistry on display that it’s hard to tell which of the men is more deserving of her flinty affections, there hesitantly unfolds a love triangle so inert you could grow antibiotic mold on it. Which might actually be pretty useful, as Giulio posits — a full decade before the discovery of penicillin — that the Spanish Flu pandemic that has just begun to grip the already war-ravaged region, may be best treated with mold spores. 

There is some fine period detailing here, and a well-achieved atmosphere both sterile and sickly, as befits a wartime clinic run to ruthlessly prioritize the military over the medicinal.  “Murderer! Murderer!” screeches an old woman at the young guard who will not open the gates to the increasing numbers of desperately feverish local kids who’ve been turned away from the overwhelmed civilian hospitals. But formal polish and some flashes of insight into a terrible historical moment cannot hide the fundamental structural issues, the lack of connective tissue between scenes, the characterization so thin it could have a wasting disease, the sense of whole subplots hacked off like gangrenous limbs that, post-amputation, still give off a persistent phantom itch. “Battleground,” despite being set in the most dramatic, life-or-death times, trundles from one anticlimax to another, and when true suffering, slaughter and pandemic devastation abound, it is hard to connect to such malingering.